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A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is
an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of
the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the
ideas present in them.
This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated,
self-acting, or to soul in conjunction with some other entity.
Isolated, self-acting, how is it possible? Self-acting, it has
knowledge of its own content, and this is not perception but
intellection: if it is also to know things outside itself it can
grasp them only in one of two ways: either it must assimilate
itself to the external objects, or it must enter into relations
with something that has been so assimilated.
Now as long as it remains self-centred it cannot assimilate: a
single point cannot assimilate itself to an external line: even
line cannot adapt itself to line in another order, line of the
intellectual to line of the sensible, just as fire of the
intellectual and man of the intellectual remain distinct from
fire and man of the sensible. Even Nature, the soul-phase which
brings man into being, does not come to identity with the man it
shapes and informs: it has the faculty of dealing with the
sensible, but it remains isolated, and, its task done, ignores
all but the intellectual as it is itself ignored by the sensible
and utterly without means of grasping it.
Suppose something visible lying at a distance: the soul sees it;
now, admitting to the full that at first only the pure idea of
the thing is seized- a total without discerned part- yet in the
end it becomes to the seeing soul an object whose complete detail
of colour and form is known: this shows that there is something
more here than the outlying thing and the soul; for the soul is
immune from experience; there must be a third, something not thus
exempt; and it is this intermediate that accepts the impressions
of shape and the like.
This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the
material object so as to be an exact reproduction of its states,
and it must be of the one elemental-stuff: it, thus, will exhibit
the condition which the higher principle is to perceive; and the
condition must be such as to preserve something of the
originating object, and yet not be identical with it: the
essential vehicle of knowledge is an intermediary which, as it
stands between the soul and the originating object, will,
similarly, present a condition midway between the two spheres, of
sense and the intellectual-linking the extremes, receiving from
one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to
assimilate itself to each. As an instrument by which something is
to receive knowledge, it cannot be identical with either the
knower or the known: but it must be apt to likeness with both-
akin to the external object by its power of being affected, and
to the internal, the knower, by the fact that the modification it
takes becomes an idea.
If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to
sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that
the soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the
order of sense.
The organ must be either the body entire or some member set apart
for a particular function; thus touch for one, vision for
another. The tools of craftsmanship will be seen to be
intermediaries between the judging worker and the judged object,
disclosing to the experimenter the particular character of the
matter under investigation: thus a ruler, representing at once
the straightness which is in the mind and the straightness of a
plank, is used as an intermediary by which the operator proves
his work.
Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere: Is
it necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception
is to take place should be in contact with the organ of
perception, or can the process occur across space upon an object
at a distance? Thus, is the heat of a fire really at a distance
from the flesh it warms, the intermediate space remaining
unmodified; is it possible to see colour over a sheer blank
intervening between the colour and the eye, the organ of vision
reaching to its object by its own power?
For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things
of sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the
body.
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